Progress

GitLab MCP Server sends real-time progress notifications during long-running operations, allowing MCP clients to display progress indicators to the user.

How it works

When a tool performs multiple steps or processes large datasets, the server sends notifications/progress messages to the client:

sequenceDiagram
    participant U as User
    participant AI as AI Assistant
    participant S as MCP Server
    participant GL as GitLab API

    U->>AI: "List all project issues"
    AI->>S: gitlab_issue list
    S-->>AI: Progress: "Fetching page 1..." (25%)
    S->>GL: GET /projects/42/issues?page=1
    S-->>AI: Progress: "Fetching page 2..." (50%)
    S->>GL: GET /projects/42/issues?page=2
    S-->>AI: Progress: "Fetching page 3..." (75%)
    S->>GL: GET /projects/42/issues?page=3
    S-->>AI: Progress: "Complete" (100%)
    S-->>AI: Tool result with all issues

Use cases

Progress reporting is used for operations that may take several seconds:

Operation	Progress Detail
Paginated list retrieval	Page-by-page fetch progress
Bulk operations	Per-item progress (e.g., bulk issue update)
Sampling analysis	Data collection → LLM analysis phases
CSV import	Per-row import progress
Auto-update	Download and apply steps

Client display

How progress is displayed depends on the MCP client:

VS Code / Copilot — Progress indicator in the status bar or output panel
Claude Desktop — Progress text shown during tool execution
Claude Code — Real-time terminal progress updates

Progress message format

Progress notifications follow the MCP protocol format:

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "method": "notifications/progress",
  "params": {
    "progressToken": "tool-call-123",
    "progress": 50,
    "total": 100,
    "message": "Fetching page 2 of 4..."
  }
}

Field	Description
`progressToken`	Correlation ID linking progress to the original tool call
`progress`	Current step number
`total`	Total number of steps (when known)
`message`	Human-readable description of the current step